Constraints on Born-Infeld gravity from the speed of gravitational waves after GW170817 and GRB 170817A

Abstract

The observations of gravitational waves from the binary neutron star merger event GW170817 and the subsequent observation of its electromagnetic counterparts from the gamma-ray burst GRB 170817A provide us a significant opportunity to study theories of gravity beyond general relativity. An important outcome of these observations is that they constrain the difference between the speed of gravity and the speed of light to less than $10^{-15}c$. Also, the time delay between the arrivals of gravitational waves at different detectors constrains the speed of gravity at the Earth to be in the range $0.55c < v_{gw} < 1.42c$. We use these results to constrain a widely studied modified theory of gravity: Eddington-inspired Born-Infeld (EiBI) gravity. We show that, in EiBI theory, the speed of gravitational waves in matter deviates from $c$. From the time delay in arrival of gravitational wave signals at Earth-based detectors, we obtain the bound on the theory parameter $\kappa$ as $\vert\kappa\vert \lesssim 10^{21}\, m^2$. Similarly, from the time delay between the signals of GW170817 and GRB 170817A, in a background Friedmann-Robertson-Walker universe, we obtain $\vert \kappa \vert \lesssim 10^{37}\, m^2$. Although the bounds on $\kappa$ are weak compared to other earlier bounds from the study of neutron stars, stellar evolution, primordial nucleosynthesis, etc., our bounds are from the direct observations and thus worth noting.